15 - All Grown Up, or So They Told Me | Growing Up In My Narcissistic Family

©Miriam A. Mason

By the time I was 21, I knew I didn't feel at all like an adult. I wept and felt depressed for my birthday, and every birthday thereafter. There was no reason to celebrate my life, my birth. Nobody else had, why should I? I was a complete failure, saw things and felt things that didn't align with my father's position and was therefore doomed to live in mediocrity according to him.

That 21st birthday was not a joyous time. It should have been a huge celebration, and big excitement for what was to come. But it wasn't. It was horrible. Never having received the nurturing unconditional love and support that provides a child with enough self-love to be successful and happy, no matter what they choose to be, I felt groundless, and frightened to try my hand at anything in which I could potentially fail. It literally paralyzed me by the time I was supposed to be a young adult.

My parents approved of theater to a point, and would have gladly worn the golden feather of my making it in their caps, if I had, but also told me on numerous occasions that I had chosen a flimsy emotionally motivated career, that wasn't serious or really real, especially if I had flopped. I couldn't win in either case.

While I enjoyed being on stage, and my parents approved of it as long as I was doing the right kind of plays, I also struggled to connect with the people who had chosen theater themselves. In my father's own voice inside my head, they seemed overly self centered, vindictive, gossipy and in my heart, they felt incredibly unkind. I felt that in my soul, I was (and am) essentially a kind person. I didn't want to be with other theater people, I really didn't want to do it, didn't want it badly enough, because I hadn't really wanted it to begin with. It was an attempt at making a career of which my father would be proud. Because if I tried it, really gone the course, I'd lose either way, my parents taking credit for me if I succeeded and criticizing me unendingly if I failed. I was going to lose in either scenario, and, in fact, felt I already had.

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With ballet, I was quite good by 14, but the same, absolutely no emotional support from parents to allow me to remain grounded and healthy while I tried it. And my experience with ballet also ended on a terrible emotional note during which I received no support at all from my mother. The silliness of a teenage crush and another adult who didn't understand set me off on a common teenage experience of emotional trauma and unrequited love. But it became a massive mountain to my mother that was enough for her to pull me from ballet forever and discourage me from ever going back.

She told me later that my ballet master had called and told her that he'd had such great dreams for me. I was already busy trying to live my parents' dreams of me. I seemed to be living everybody's dreams but my own. I didn't even recognize my own anymore. I knew I wanted to live alone on an abandoned tropical island with animal friends, hunting fish, running through the forest, climbing trees, surviving the wildenerness... and being away from most everybody people-ish.

Leaving ballet was just as well. My parents wanted me to be graceful like a ballerina and I was growing quite large breasts by that time. George Ballenchine's mentally unwell notion of a stick woman equals beauty was (and still is) all powerful and anorexia was just beginning, although I didn't partake. Even though I'd been removed from ballet, I still dreamed of dancing. But I realized that my dream of being a ballerina would die as my breasts grew far beyond the acceptable limit. It was a private death, for my mother minimized it; whereas dance culture did not. I still miss dance. Only the dance part. Nothing else. And I'm not even sure if my loving it was because my parents wanted me to love it, or because I really did. So tangled a web they wove.

Sad Clown, my first solo before moving to a professional studio.

Writing? Well, how could I possibly follow the act that was my father? The poet, rhetoric professor of a department at UC Berkeley that he helped to found. Published many books of poetry, translation and other writing. Emeritus, Guggenheim winner, etc. etc. etc. Isn't he the ultimate? In order to write, I had to write as he did, or very similarly, and to have followed his path into academia which I did not really want at all, even though I convinced myself I did, because deep down I wanted to be the Golden Child. But it was all so fake. I could not bring myself to do it. How could I write inauthentically in order to please my father? There was nothing to say. I felt empty. Nothing came out.


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I ended up having all sorts of varying careers, from word processor, to desktop store manager, to executive assistant, to technical writer, to graphic artist, to online forum coordinator/manager. In the last area is where I had the most fun and where I met my beloved and truly supportive husband. I actually don't have a particular "thing" I do. It's nebulous and varied. And I'm pretty good when I put my mind to a thing. But I didn't get a PhD, which is what he had wanted. And I never will, because I do not want to do it and even less now that I understand the psychological dynamic that was playing out in our family. I don't want to give him the satisfaction. I want to write without having had to follow him, if I write.

It would have to be mine, not his. And until I figured out how I was given a false voice, as demonstrated in these writings, I really couldn't find the reason, inspiration or passion to write at all. Because I was supposed to write under his terms, conditions, definitions and rules. Set up for failure.

Writing this blog seems to have unplugged something in me and I find I am writing overall a lot more. Empty gone, overfull now. I guess I've been sitting on my tongue for a long long time.

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If there is one other thing I am proud of being, it's being a better parent to my children than my parents were ever to me, by a wide margin. Not at first, certainly. At first I went along assuming what my parents had done was right and I hurt my children. Especially my older son. I haven't words to explain the level of gratitude I have that I didn't continue on that path. I am not perfect, but I am mindfully and consciously working every day to become more aware, better, more conscious, more connected with my children.

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Being a mother has been by far the most satisfying and life-changing of all my experiences. I consider that the most important job in the world, especially given my children have special needs and perceptions. They would have been destroyed in a family such as the one I was raised in. And my children have taught me more than my parents ever did about unconditional love. With such brilliant teachers, I haven't far to go to be reminded of the importance of conscious respectful parenting.

Saying it again. Because it feels right to say it. It has taken me until 51 to finally realize that I am a survivor of a psychological form of abuse. That I witnessed the abuse of both myself and my sister. We were girls, and were not taken nearly as seriously for our own loves than my brother had been. My brother was the Golden Child. My father spoke proudly of him even when he was a big time drug dealer making hundreds of thousands of dollars and living a wealthy life of addiction and money and dealing. My sister and I were always less than him, even then. And so big brother has, by default, become the next narcissist-in-chief. As far as I am concerned, he is welcome to that particular crown.